User blog:Concernedalien11780/And Now For Something That Looks Like A Blog Post
Good day, Monty Python Wiki, this is Concernedalien11780. My history with Monty Python goes back to when I was eight years old. Back then, I still enjoyed the company of my father, appreciating when he tried to be funny rather than occasionally restricting his right to communicate with others through humor, and admiring his frequent angry ramblings about the direction the world is headed and how the media covers events rather than allowing that to affect me to the point where I become contrarian to any social-political opinions presented to me, regardless of what they are and what my personal beleifs are, simply because of how his upbringing made me generally confrontational in that regard. We made up stories together involving a teddy bear with a hand puppet hole in its back allowing its head to move back and forth that we called The Friendly Bear, who was "a loving bear, not a fighting bear," who would faint in shock when learning of Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow and declaring six more weeks of winter, because it meant six more weeks of hibernation for him when he wants to be out and about. He would go on a bunch of world-saving adventures with my Bionicle figures, and none of the stories ever made sense. They didn't have to, they were stories a dad and an eight-year-old boy were making with toys. One of these days, my dad decided to take this into Monty Python territory and have the heroes fight the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog and blow it up with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, and later travel across the Bridge of Death and deal with the bridge-keeper in the same way he was dealt with in Holy Grail. One day around this time, right before I was about to go to my weekly psychological torture session more commonly known as "swimming lessons," when my dad decided to play those above-mentioned parts of Holy Grail on the VHS tape (remember those? Of course you don't, you're using a computer) we owned. They didn't make me feel better, and I still never learned how to swim (which I'm perfectly OK with as long as I play it safe around water, my Asperger's Syndrome brain wiring sometimes keeps the simplest and most essential of tasks unlearnable), but I did see a rabbit decapitate a knight with its teeth for the very first time, so I guess that's worth something. A few years later, when I was twelve, I received a DVD (oh, come on, at least one of you has to remember these things. No one? Really? You people...) of Holy Grail, because by then we had moved our VHS player and tapes to one of our condo properties in Wildwood, New Jersey, yet my dad still wanted a way to have Holy Grail in his house and share it with his son. When I was fifteen, I saw Spamalot at the Fulton Theater in Lancaster and even used it to make a story with a sort-of-friend (I call him that because I realize now that I was not a good friend to him, like, at all, often crafting stories in which his death was what saved the day, and not in the heroic sacrifice fashion, and how tried to force him to be exposed to plenty of things he wasn't mentally ready for, we're acquaintences on more mature terms now, and his mom, who is a teacher at the high school I went to before graduating last month and he will still go to for two more years, sees me as one of her favorite students and is stll friends with my mom) that was essentially a mixture of Holy Grail and Spamalot (I say that because they don't tell the exact same story) with characters from things we liked at the time. In our version, the Black Knight was played by Black Yoshi, a character from the SuperMarioLogan videos on YouTube which I now realize are ignorant YouTube trash. Black Yoshi was a Yoshi from the Mario video game franchise that was, well, the color black, and acted as a ghetto African-American stereotype, using an NES Zapper as a glock and loved fried chicken, grape Kool-Aid, and watermelon flavored anything. Certainly wasn't the kind of character I needed in a YouTube series I was watching in eighth grade, when I was being constantly bullied by individuals of my age, most of which were Hispanic-American kids that tried to emulate the ghetto lifestyle and refused to put effort forward in school, for being skinny, pale white, having a nasal voice, and in general just being not them. After two years in the hellhole that was Little Keswick School, I returned to Wyomissing Area Junior-Senior High School with much more social awareness, and most kids had grown up by then as well. Many of the people that I had problems with before became fairly strong acquaintences, and the rest either didn't care either way about me or were expelled for doing fake weed on campus. Oh, right, this blog is about Monty Python. We took the characteristics of the Black Knight and exaggerated them when applied to Black Yoshi. Not only did Black Yoshi the Black Knight not give up fighting even when losing his limbs, he even became delusional that he still had his limbs and was defeating the "good guys" with ease, even though they had left him crushed under a random spaceship that fell into the vicinity of the forest and were well away from his laying place while he was boasting of having killed them where they stand, even though that obviously didn't even come close to happening. Of course, not much has happened in the media with Monty Python since then. I did, however, become a South Park superfan at age sixteen and a half due to its quick production schedule, willingness to be libertarian in a liberal industry, and relatability of Butters (even though it's less inspired by Python now and more inspired by what Comedy Central executives believe audiences want "satire" of nowadays). Why does this matter here? Well, I decided that it only makes sense to look more into the culture of the main inspiration for one of my favorite shows of all time. Monty Python has influenced many comedians, is one of the few things that can still keep me barely connected to my dad today, and even those that try to be politically correct, like my older sister, who has become a self-hating white woman since her college trip to Birmingham, Alabama in her sophmore year of college, aren't immune to its charms. This blog is where I will be blogging about things related to Monty Python and things influenced by it, talking about my favorite and least favorite things in the fandom, but it will also be a "controversy blog," in which I will rant about things that bother me in society, should something occur and I feel that my opinion is being shafted by those around me in person. I chose this place for that because the Monty Python fandom seems the most likely to accept unpopular or unusual social-political opinions of all of the wiki communities I have joined or have the desire to join. An old quote said by someone that I forget the name of right now is "All progress comes from those who present unpopular opinions." I believe that stopped being true in the early-to-mid-2010s. Now those that identify as politically progressive are in the majority in the media. As good of a thing as this may appear on the surface, I believe that no ideology gets things entirely right. Those that were fighting opression in the mid-2000s eventually became the ones doing the opressing, at least on a social level rather than a genuinely measureable level. And yet they act like nothing has changed since the 1960s. Nothing will ever be perfect in society. There will always be those who think of petty reasons to exclude others socially, like ethnicity, orephus used for urinating, desires for sexual pleasure, interest in video games, you name it. Nothing will ever be perfect. However, those that support acceptance of people regardless of race, gender equality, gay rights, gender as a state of mind rather than a stable thing that can never be changed, and religious belief or lack thereof are the majority, a majority that I am in, even while disagreeing with how others in that majority go about expressing their beliefs. Acting like there is still constant oppression just because a few sad-sacks on Fox News, in the deeper South, or on 4chan don't agree with you betrays your cause. Rather than try to control how others think, we should all try to just do good by and for the ones in our lives. That is how we can make the most progressive world possible. Or we can just watch more Python, that might work too. Thank you for reading, and if I'm ethically wrong and anti-progressive for saying my opinion on this blog, you can always go to the TransParent Fan Fiction Wiki or somewhere like that for thought with more social justice. Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts